St. Lawrence University

Geology Newsletter Winter 2014

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SLUGAC 9: Charting Path Forward (September 25-27, 2015)

Please mark your calendars! The theme of the conference highlights one of the

original goals of SLUGAC, which was to provide students with an alumni

perspective of the world that awaits them after SLU.’

The 1st circular with more information will be sent out in January!

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Greetings from the New Chair,

It is a pleasure to write to you with greetings about the Department of Geology. I took over as chair for Jeff Chiarenzelli, who

selflessly served for the past four years. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank him for numerous contributions he made to

the vitality of our program. It will not be an easy task to maintain the momentum Jeff so diligently kept.

St. Lawrence is a very dynamic place and our department is no exception. Over the past few years, the department has grown

significantly, and currently we have 45 majors and 3 minors. Why do they choose geology? As we get to know them, we find

that many believe geology is an exciting career pathway that will allow them to make a difference in society by their work, and to spend at least

some of their time outdoors. Many also state that their interest in geology comes from the reputation of the department as being one of the best

on campus, welcoming, and providing students with numerous opportunities. We still believe in getting students ‘out in the field’, and most of our

courses have a significant field component. Last year trips were offered to Jamaica (carbonate sedimentology), Alaska (glacial geology), and

Colorado (petrology, mineralogy). In the past, destinations have included the Bahamas, Costa Rica, Dutch Antilles, United Kingdom,

Yellowstone and Grand Teton parks, Acadia National Park, North Dakota and Mt. Kilimanjaro. All expenses, aside from the airfare, are paid for

by the department.

In addition to field studies, our students have recently participated in faculty-lead research in varied geological settings, ranging from Canadian

Rockies to the Andes and the Dinaric Alps. Students have also participated in a wide range of analytical studies at world-class facilities including

the Arizona Laserchron Center in Tucson, the Isotope Geochemistry and Geochemistry Research Center at Carleton University in Ottawa, the

Sensitive High-Resolution Ion Microprobe Laboratory at Curtain University in Perth, Australia, among others. During the last summer the

department was also able to support 4 summer research fellows through competition for University funds, the J. Mark Erickson and the Linus R.

Gilbert funds. Student research is vibrant and varied, and we had four of them presenting at the GSA Annual Convention in Vancouver. The

James S. Street Fund has proven particularly valuable in supporting student research efforts above and beyond what we can afford through

external grants, University and our department budget. The Street Fund also provides the portion of travel and registration expenses, not

covered by the Dean’s Office, for students who attend professional conferences. In addition to the Geology club, our students have two local

chapters, AAPG and Sigmma Gamma Epsilon of the Geology Honorary Society. The department has a long history of producing a large

proportion of graduates who go on to graduate school and eventually obtain Masters or Doctoral degrees. Last year our students have been

accepted at Colorado School of Mines, Idaho, Missouri, Washington, and Temple University.

Currently we have 5 faculty, whose research interests include aqueous geochemistry, dendrochronology, isotope geology, Devonian

paleontology, military geology, and carbonate sedimentology among others. Faculty published more than 3 dozen papers in the last few years,

many in top-notch journals, including Geology, GSA Bulletin, Precambrian Research, AAPG Bulletin, and Sedimentology.

Every good house is built on solid foundations! And our foundations are the preceding faculty, Bob Bloomer, Bill Elberty, and most recently

Mark Erickson. Mark’s life and career has been and still is dedicated to the department and especially to our students and alumni. We will try to

follow his footsteps and build and nurture strong connections with our alumni. Along these lines we continue to regularly host our triennial

SLUGAC meetings, where our students are introduced to a wide range of career options that you have pursued and thus benefit from your

experience and wise counsel. An integral part of each SLUGAC meeting has been the Bloomer Lecture with banquet. Unfortunately, the

Bloomer Lecture Fund has been depleted and we are looking into ways to reinstitute it. Anyways, I am happy to invite you to participate at

SLUGAC 9, which will be held September 25-27 on campus – please mark your calendars!

What lies ahead of us? The Brown Hall hasn’t changed much for decades. However, thanks to a generous donation by one of you, and a matching

funding by the University, a new modern classroom is currently being built in Brown, and should hopefully be finished by SLUGAC. A tripled

number of majors with unchanged geology budget is putting a lot pressure on faculty and our equipment, too. Our two old field vehicles are at the

end of their life time, and need to be replaced and extended to four vehicles, hopefully through an endowment fund. Our major

equipment would also benefit from such a fund.

This program is strong thanks to the commitment and generosity of our alumni, students, faculty, and friends. You can read about their accom-

plishments in the following pages. We hope to do a facelift of our newsletter starting with the next issue, and hope that you will like it better.

Please send us notes and pictures! Have a Merry Christmas and Happy and Prosperous New Year!

Sincerely,

Antun Husinec

My best wishes to all of you out there. I hope you have a great start on the New Year. I’m writing this a bit before

Thanksgiving Break and the lake effect machinery is set up and dumping loads of snow on Buffalo and the eastern Lake

Ontario region. Road closures, stranded motorists, and even deaths, are attributed to storm Bozeman; a grim reminder

that winter is already here.

This is my first newsletter since turning over the chairmanship to Antun’s capable leadership. After four years I am glad

to relinquish it. This has given me a bit more time to focus on other things. One thing the department did this fall was

host the 86th New York State Geological Association field conference and meeting. The meeting, held in early October

at Bonnie Castle Resort in Alexandria Bay, was well attended and offered a dozen field trips. By all reports the meeting

was a success. It was the first time we had hosted the meeting since 1993.

We have also received and installed a new Rigaku X-ray fluorescence spectrometer. The XRF was a gift of Bruce

DeWyk ’58 and the J.M. McDonald Foundation, and adds to our growing list of analytical tools available to our

students and faculty for learning and research. Thank you sincerely Bruce! I am in the process of calibrating and learning how to operate the

machine and hope to have it ready to start producing great data by the spring semester.

On a personal note I’d like to thank Gerry Ross ’78 for his Ferguson Lecture on November 17th. Gerry switched careers from the Geological

Survey of Canada in Calgary to a small organic farm on Maui. He and his wife, Janet, have been rebuilding the soil and learning how the natural

system can best be applied to their area and climate. Gerry, who also gave the Herzberg Lecture at Carleton University this trip, gave an

exciting talk on how what he and others have learned can be used to feed the planet, store carbon, and preserve and improve soil.

I am enjoying the opportunity to do research with my students. Currently we are analyzing Nd and Sr isotopes from Neoproterozoic dikes in the

Adirondack region at Carleton University in Ottawa. In early January two students will accompany me to the Arizona Laserchron Center to

work on a variety of projects that require geochronological investigation.

This spring I will teach a course on New Developments in Alternative Energy and for the lab portion of the class the students and I will build a rocket stove mass heater! This should be exciting as well as a great hands-on learning opportunity. I will take two students to the Canadian Arctic this summer to work on a project with Mike Williams and Sean Regan (’10) of UMass Amherst related to their NSF- funded study of the Snowbird Tectonic Zone. After that I will be on a year-long sabbatical trying to write up what we will learn in the next few months.

Jeff Chiarenzelli

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This past summer and fall were quite productive working with students and preparing for my pre-tenure sabbatical. I

worked with Catherine Heinrich ’15 and Dr. Trent Hubbard ’94 using tree rings to reveal mass-wasting events in

permafrost terrain along the Alaskan-Canadian Highway (near Northway Jct.). Based on our analyses, mass wasting

began in the late 1980s and has recently increased significantly in the past decade (in association with a general

warming trend). Catherine presented her work at GSA in Vancouver and was even able to speak with the geologist who

invented the processes we used (Dr. Jack Shroder)! Catherine is working on her senior thesis doing some final anaylses

and writing; expecting to graduate this May. In addition, I am currently working with Hannah Drummond ’15, who

collected tree-core samples from north-central Maine. Like I told her before she left for the summer, “We’ll have to see

where the data take us.” Well, turns out that is always the case—we have recognized multiple Spruce Budworm,

Choristoneura fumiferana (Clemens) outbreaks and an overall climate (and solar) signal. Most importantly, however, is the masking of the climate

signal during the Spruce Budworm outbreaks. Hannah will be presenting her work at the NEGSA meeting this March. This time of the year is also

time to begin grooming students for next-summer’s work. As of now, Melanie Swick ’16 and Eleanor Jones ’16 are beginning their work toward

SLU Fellowship submissions in mid February. Melanie, an anthropology-geology major (heading to NZ for the

semester), is planning on working on dendroarchaeology by generating a “floating” barn-beam chronology for the

region (and hopefully connecting with a living, fixed chronology). Ellie is planning on working with dendrohydrology

by determining the feasibility of using trees in this region as proxies for pre-instrumental streamflow.

Personally, I have been preparing for my pre-tenure sabbatical by submitting grants for travel and research

support. My focus this spring will be three-fold: finalize some inactive scorpion research from my time in Iraq and

Afghanistan, working on the feasibility of streamflow reconstructions in this region and, finally, likely travel to

Tajikistan and Uzbekistan for water-resource management/transboundary works with Dr. Jack Shroder (UNO) and

his team.

Dr. Alexander K. Stewart

Hello Everyone,

This past Fall semester was a great experience while teaching Structural Geology with labs and Environmental Geology.

We enjoyed all of the lovely fall weather going out in the field for almost every lab section until it was too cold to

continue. The students were given the opportunity to create a geologic map of a peninsula on the Oswegatchie River by

Governeur and then write up a geologic history of the area.

I was further delighted that my paper “Precambrian crustal evolution in the Great Falls tectonic zone: insights from

Xenoliths from the Montana alkali province” was finally published in the Journal of Geology, volume 122, number 5.

Future plans for the Spring semester include new field trips for the Petrology class! We are first going to Ottawa to the

Canadian Museum of Nature to look at the rocks and minerals display, and then at the end of the semester, we are going to

Bancroft Ontario to view a wide variety of metamorphic rocks that range from low- to high-grade metamorphism. Likely

we will also manage some mineral collection since Bancroft has some fantastic sites!

The Fall semester has been fantastic and I am greatly looking forward to the Spring!

Jennifer Gifford

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Guten Tag.

The second half of the year 2014 has been one of planning and preparation. Apart from teaching and the finishing touch-

es on the Paleolab, I have been working with several students to set up projects for their senior year. Rudy Bentalge’16

and Hannah Drummond ‘15 will be processing data they collect over the winter in Vienna. They will be looking for evi-

dence of anthropogenic disturbance of the mollusk benthos due to heavy oil drilling in the Arabian Gulf. Jaleigh Pier’16

will be working on the effect of climate change on Eocene predator-prey interaction using

samples from Seymour Island, Antarctica, and Cullen LaPointe ’16 will be collecting mollusks in my old hunting

grounds, the Devonian of Central NY, and will be studying morphologies of pteriid bivalves. The preparations have

been promising and I will have a great group of motivated students working with me next year.

I started collaboration with a colleague at Clarkson University, Dr. Ioannis Mastorakos, to explore the possibilities of

Finite Element analysis in Invertebrate Paleontology. This type of analysis, a method mainly used in material

sciences, uses 3-d surface data and models the effect of stress and strain on the objects, in our case the shells of clams and snails.

Other than that things have been comparable quiet and this gave me the chance to further organize our Paleontology collection and update

exhibits throughout the department. I have been purchasing equipment, e.g. a 3-D scanner and a slow cutting saw, from my start-up funds and

I am happy to announce that the Paleolab is now set up and is actively used by students!

For the first time this year I had the opportunity to be part of the activities for the annual visit of Canton Middle School students. It was a great

experience to engage with these children and encourage their curiosity for science. I also visited the classrooms of my own children at the

Potsdam Elementary school to talk about Paleontology in particular of course about Dinosaurs. The kids get to touch real dinosaur stomach

stones and bone and by the end they all know how to walk like a T-rex; it is a lot of fun!

I have also been working closely with the University as the liaison for the department to help with the renovation of the new classroom for our

department. This has been an exciting chance for me to get to understand the workings of the University better and be a part of an exciting

project that will majorly improve the learning environment for our students. I personally want to take this opportunity to thank the Alumni

that are supporting us in this endeavor.

All the best for the New Year,

Judith Nagel-Myers

Salutations Geo-Folk,

Hope this finds you all well and ready for the holiday season. All is well here in good ole Brown Hall with students and faculty busy with this

last week of class and preparing for exams week after this weekend. My how the semesters fly by!

All is well at the little farm Shirley and I call home as well. The horses are good sporting nice thick winter coats and big round grass belly’s from

their light schedules and dining on good winters hay. No cows this winter but, I hope to begin my own beef herd come spring rather than

having to find and purchase weanlings each year to raise for my family and to sell to those few friends who enjoy the home grown, grass fed beef

we raise. The boys (Reno the 3 year old golden and Milo the 2 year old yellow lab) continue to enjoy life on the farm and let their presence

known whenever deer, turkey or geese decide to dine in the meadow or pasture. They do seem

enjoy making the geese fly off in a loud burst of energy! The season has been a mix of winter

like weather and mild fall days as we approach the first day of winter. The big lake effect

storm that Buffalo received just before Thanksgiving was not as bad at our place, in the end

we only received around 38” of snow in 3 days vs Buffalo’s 8 feet or so of snow in the same

time frame. After the storm ended it warmed into the 40’s and we lost most of that snow as

quickly as we received it. Crazy weather… As I type out a holiday hello to you folks this

morning the radio continues to warn us of the Nor’easter that is beginning to visit the east

coast and threatens to reach northern New York state. Gotta love winter!

I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season filled with hope, love, friendship, and

joy. Merry Christmas!

Matt VanBrocklin

Ben Rendall ‘11

I have been spending quite a bit of time in the Middle East with my

Exxon-Mobil Carbonate Stratigraphy Group. I have made 2

additional trips to Qatar to look at North Field cores and one trip to

UAE to work on a microporosity project for the supergiant Upper

Zakum oil field. I also had a great trip with Jim Markello to Turks

and Caicos to look at some modern sedimentss. In October, Estella

and I went to Chicago where I ran the Chicago Marathon (4 hr 21 min)! I’ll be back in

both Qatar and Abu Dhabi during January and February of next year. Currently I am

describing my way through a mountain of thin sections and well logs. I hope the semester

is going well!

John Murphy ‘11

I accepted a job offer

with Schlumberger, and

currently work as a

borehole geologist for

their PetroTechnical

team in Bakersfield, California. My thesis manuscript

was recently accepted for publication by Sedimentary

Geology.

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Greetings Friends,

It is getting pretty quiet around here as I write this because this is Friday afternoon and Thanksgiving Break has

begun! Of course for me it is just any other day! Sherrie has reminded us that she would like the Newsletter copy by

Monday however! I will send just a few notes this time to let you know that I am still functioning.

I did not get any serious fishing done this summer – that’s the biggest news. Much was intended but little

materialized. In the thick of summer John Hoganson decided it was time to transfer my library and collections to the

ND Heritage Center where I am donating them to the Johnsrud Paleontology Laboratory of the NDGS. We loaded a 14-foot U-Haul truck with

most of my journals, books and fossils and made the 3-day drive to Bismarck in mid July. The NDGS paid for travel expenses for which I was

very grateful. I stayed to work with John on the shark paper and another paper that has been pending a while. We finished the shorter paper

and made progress on the shark paper. The figures are done and John has since completed the first draft of the taxonomic descriptions.

Progress has been made!

Prior to that trip I had a visit from Lance and Emily. After the trip I visited with my brothers. Glenn and his wife, Jane, have moved to

Vermont and both Ray and I have found that an excellent decision on their part as we get to golf – and hopefully to fish—together more often.

The 10 yards of topsoil that Ray and I distributed over the vegetable garden did great things for the yield this year so we have lots of organic

beans, carrots, squash, beets and Brussels sprouts to help us through the winter. In the fall we put 4 yds. on the flower garden and replanted

that as a butterfly garden. I imagine the deer won’t recognize it that way but......

I have completed a couple of manuscripts and am in the rewriting stage on some others. I interrupted the writing to teach a SOAR course for

retirees this September—“Tales Fossils Tell Me” subtitled “Life in the Cincinnatian” was the topic and I had a full class of 16 who stayed with

me the whole time! They say they had fun. October took me to GSA in Vancouver where I roomed with Chris Stevens and really enjoyed the

meeting. The St Lawrence alumni event was hosted by Antun Husinec at a local pub and it was well attended. I was especially happy to see

some west coast alumni that I seldom see including Michelle Judson, now retired from BP, and Andy Nevin of Nevin Engineering in Vancouver.

Had a good visit with Dan Peppe from Baylor as well. What a great group of people we had there. SLU faculty and students presented and 30

or so alumni papers were included in the meeting.

Since then, I have been putting the garden to bed, doing a little writing and running the stewardship program at church. As Thanksgiving

approaches, I am beginning to look toward Christmas plans. I imagine most of you are thinking of the holidays as well, so I will wish you all the

best for Christmas and the New Year. 2015 will be an important year for the Geology Department and no doubt for the globe as well! I’m sure

Antun will tell you what’s up for the year ahead in his note.

Warmest regards,

Dr. E.

Amelia Oates ‘12

I very much like the University of Washington

Applied MESSAGe Program! It feels so great to

be back into academia and studying geoscience

alongside some brilliant scientists. I am taking

more engineering based classes now and I find

myself referring to my notes from SLU almost

daily. I'm currently in Hillslope Geomorphology

with Alison Duvall, whom I just learned knows

Fred Read! Such a small world, we chatted about

my thesis project and how wonderful it was to work with Antun & Fred in

Croatia. It's such a great reminder of how small this Geology community

truly is!

Thomas Lockwood ‘14

Things are going very well at the Colorado

School of Mines a full ride and a monthly

RA stipend! I am on track to earn a

Master's in Geology (focus in Petroleum) in

2 to 2.5 years. I will be taking Carbonate

Sedimentology and Petrology (a 600 level),

Advanced Petroleum Geology (600 level) and Integrated

Exploration and Development (500 Level)- the latter two being

taught by my advisor Dr. Sonnenberg. I've had interviews for

next summer internships with Marathon Oil and Noble Energy,

and have upcoming interviews with SM Energy, Hess, Oasis, and

Statoil.

Tyler Harris ‘13

In October I started working as a mud

logger/sample catcher. I am working in the

Swanson River Oilfield on the Kenai

Peninsula, Alaska. There is a lot of

interesting stuff going on and I am starting

to learn some of the programs and work. Hopefully my

work from sedimentology will come in handy once we

start looking at the samples! I work the night shift from

6pm to 6am. It was a tough transition to make, but I

think as of today I have the sleep pattern figured out.

I'm looking forward to doing some exploring of the area

once I have some time off. Hopefully I can go hiking in

the mountains near Anchorage before I fly home.

Chris Mudge ‘13

I have accepted a RA

position at Idaho State

University. Looks like I

will be following Ben's

path out west.

I attended GSA this fall in

Vancouver. My work with

SRK has been going well.

The days are starting to get

shorter in Alaska. I hope all

is well.

Christopher Stevens ‘04

Cameron Mitiguy ‘14

Officially got the job today (12/11/14) after two weeks of

training in Tulsa Oklahoma. I will be moving down to West

Texas Sunday as a mud logger in the Permian Basin for

Horizon Well Logging. All those carb sed stratigraphy labs

and classes paid off!

Happy Holidays,

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Geology Club Highlights - Fall 2014

The Geology Club at St. Lawrence provides opportunities for students to

order field equipment, create fun SLU GEO apparel, and visit natural

history museums in northern New York. This semester, the Geology club set

goals to create SLU GEO apparel and order field equipment. We also

embroidered apparel with the SLU GEO logo and purchased rock hammers

for students. For the spring 2015 semester, the club will order mugs with the

SLU GEO logo. The final orders for these neat mugs will be placed early next

semester, which will be available to current and past Geology students. Early

next semester, we are also planning on visiting the Ottawa Natural History

Museum. Lastly, the Geology Club is open to possible volunteer opportuni-

ties at St. Lawrence in the spring.

St. Lawrence Sigma Gamma Epilson Chapter: New Inductees

and the 100th Year Anniversary (Spring 2015)

Sigma Gamma Epsilon (S.G.E.), the national honorary society

for the Earth Sciences, acknowledges exceptional students in

the Geosciences. S.G.E. students are required to have at least a

3.0 Geology GPA and take a substantial number of classes

before induction. We were proud to receive five new members

for the honorary society this semester, including: Kelan

Koncewicz, Austin Hart, William Moynihan, John Miller, and

Kathleen Sears. Congratulations to the new inductees! Finally,

SGE will be sending two representatives from our SLU chap-

ter to the 100th SGE Anniversary at the University of Kansas

on March 25th to 27th next year.

AAPG

The St. Lawrence chapter of AAPG got off to a great start

this fall semester as three new officials were elected.

Daniel Milavec '15 is the new acting President, John

Miller '16 will serve as VP and Nora Kinslow '15 will act as

Treasurer. After the election, the documentary Switch was screened. This

movie provides several views on global energy and further helped to edu-

cate our club members on current issues surrounding global energy issues,

fossil fuels, and alternative forms of energy production. With our funds,

the club plans to provide more educational opportunities focusing on

petroleum geology and possible career opportunities.

Canton Middle School Students Visit Geology Department

The geology department hosted around 100 fifth graders from the

Canton Central School. Students enjoyed presentations on careers

in geology, and enjoyed hands-on experience in dendrochronology,

paleontology, structural geology, and sedimentology. We received

many ‘Thank You’ notes and beautiful hand drawn cards from

students and their teachers, who also appreciated munchkins and

apple cider. As always, the most exciting part of the trip was a

demonstration of a volcano eruption. This year it was pretty

spectacular, with several students getting wet!

GSA in Vancouver, was great, we saw some folks we don’t get to see very often at both the meeting and the SLU gathering. There were 37

SLU presentations, 4 by students, at the meeting! We saw the following:

Graham Baird Aaron Chesler David Griffing Hillary Hagen-Peter Kelly Hale

John Huntley Michelle Judson Mimi Katz David Kratzmann Sam Lagor

Brendan Moran Kathy & Brian Mullaney Andrew Nevin Amelia Oates Camille Partin

Dan Peppe Sean Regan Chris Stevens Barb & David Tewksbury

2014 Senior Theses

Michele E. Goldberg - Modern Mixed Carbonate-Siliciclastic Depositional Environment of the Salem Bay, Jamaica. Advisor: Dr. Husinec

Bryn W. Keenhold - Post-Glacial Signature of Fox Fen, Northwestern Adirondacks: Correlation to Brandreth Bog and Ballston Lake,

Adirondacks. Advisor: Dr. Stewart

Roselyne C. Laboso - Weekly Monitoring of River Chemistry in St. Lawrence County, New York. Advisor: Dr. Chiarenzelli

Thomas D. Lockwood - Facies Change Along the Margin of a Deep-Marine Terminal Splay, Neoproterozoic Windermere Supergroup,

British Columbia, Canada. Advisor: Dr. Husinec

Saddie R. Serviss - Chronology Development and Climate Response of Pinus strobus L., Crooked Lake, Adirondacks, New York: April

Showers Bring Narrow Rings? Advisor: Dr. Stewart

SEND US YOUR NEWS!

WE WOULD LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU.